Notice that there is no DVD-Drive, No Hard Drive, and no Video Card. Are they necessary? NOPE! These are a few items that I originally had in my build but decided to take out because in reality, we don’t need them. Let me explain:

Hard Drive: With having a NAS Solution (you’ll see below), all VM data will be stored in the NAS. I purchased the ADATA 8GB Flash Drive and boot ESXi off of the drive since it loads into the RAM upon boot. The cheapest SATA Hard drives I could find on Newegg or Tigerdirect was $59.99, so essentially by buying 2 Flash drives instead I SAVED at least $108!

Video Card: The i7-3770 will run HD Graphics 4000 so if you choose the right motherboard you can bypass the need for a videocard. This saved about another $120

DVD-Drive: No need for this if we setup ESXi on flash drives before plugging them in to the host. Saved another $40.00!

So a quick estimate of savings by not purchasing those 3 pieces of hardware (for 2 hosts) is roughly $270.

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Nice to see somebody else finding merit in using commodity (efficient/affordable) gear for a home lab, with a lot in common with my older http://tinkertry.com/vzilla build (ASRock/GSKILLCyberPower). No regrets here, with 9 VMs left running 24×7. Yeah, totally unsupported, but also saving a lot of $$$.